| |
 |
| © Andrew Moore |
| Green Trucks, White Nights, Solovki 2002. Click photo for a gallery of Andrew Moore's images. |
Jörg Colberg: I was very impressed by your photography in Russia, especially given the wide range of locations you were able to use. Given Russia's history, this must have been quite the endeavor. How did you manage to get access to so many different sites, some of which I would have thought to be completely inaccessible to Westerners with big cameras?
Andrew Moore: I have to admit that one of the aspects of being a photographer I enjoy most is the opportunity to play both detective and spy. As a child, I seem to have been attracted to forbidden places. It actually got me into quite a bit of trouble later when I was a teenager, and even today my son teases me that I will go anywhere at anytime until the dogs chase me out.
I imagine that growing up during all the propaganda of the Cold War, it was inevitable I would eventually seek out places Americans weren't supposed to go, especially those behind the Iron Curtain. In the early 1980s, I traveled quite a bit in Eastern Europe, especially in Prague and throughout what was then Czechoslovakia. Although the party system was tremendously oppressive, especially for any nonconformist, the secretive and at times absurd atmosphere was impossibly seductive for someone like myself. As a traveler, I felt a mixture of constant apprehension and keen admiration for the resourcefulness of the Czechs. In the mid-'90s, when I first went to Cuba, I felt something of the same ambience, although the controls by the state there were much better integrated into the society, and thus less visible but more effective.
I mention all this to point out that by the time I did my project on Russia, I was quite familiar with the workings of Communist and police states and had some idea how to navigate through them as a foreigner. Although one method is to work through diplomatic channels to gain entry to controlled places, my approach has always been to fly below the radar, so to speak. The first thing I try to do is find someone who has the contacts, charm, and curiosity necessary to get things done in a bureaucratic maze, as well as someone who understands what kinds of pictures I'm trying to make. I was quite lucky in Russia to meet two young individuals, one a photographer and the other a location scout, who were amazingly adept at gaining access to unusual and difficult sites.
By the time I started working in Russia in 2000, the Communist system itself had been mostly dismantled, but the mentality was pretty much the same as before, in that foreigners were generally viewed with some suspicion as well as with a certain degree of envy. Although I don't speak much Russian, I did try to blend in as much as possible by doing basic things like buying clothes and shoes in local shops. When dealing with the authorities, there were several tactics to take. Sometimes we would apply for permits to make a low-budget Russian movie, which required a small fee to be paid. Sometimes it was a matter of charming the babushka who sternly manned the front desk; often in these cases we would show her my notebook of pictures I'd taken thus far, and as she flipped through the images, the iciness of her composure would slowly melt, she would begin to chat about this or that place, and soon enough she couldn't stop talking and everything was fine. This picture book was certainly one of the best ways to engage individuals who by their whim could grant access with a nod or phone call. We also occasionally paid a small "tip," as when we wanted to photograph this radar base near the Mongolian border. The soldier on duty there accepted 500 rubles (about $15, maybe a month's salary for him) to let us take pictures.
The most difficult cases were in the Far East, where some cities still remain off-limits to foreigners. There I pretended to be an Estonian assistant to my guide, who in turn posed as the photographer. Although my Estonian is no better than my Russian, it was a convenient ruse for everyone. They have a saying in Russian to the effect that "What is forbidden is still possible," and I found this to be very often true, which I would say is not the case in the United States at present.
JC: Given what you said, for you, as the photographer, a project like Russia must then be so much more than those photos, with all the stories and the memories behind the photos. I know that you also teach photography at Princeton and School of Visual Arts. To what extent do you share the non-technical aspects of your work? Or is this something that the students will eventually have to find for themselves, each in his or her own way?
AM: My friend Julius Shulman is very fond of saying that the camera is the least important aspect of taking pictures. With students I try to emphasize that photography is an extended process of decision-making and not about a singular "decisive moment." (One revelation of the digital era is that this notion of "process" has been made quite explicit.) So in my classes we talk about everything from very detailed technical issues, to questions of strategy for finding and approaching a subject, as well as personal and philosophical questions about the ideas that illuminate their images. I feel strongly that the collaborative aspect of picture making is ultimately what enriches and expands one's ability to see and to know, and perhaps as their teacher, I'm one part of that collaboration. Often photography students start out thinking that they have to work alone, which may have something to do with cherished myths regarding the secretive or isolated artist. However, the best student work I come across is both inclusive in a personal sense and expansive with regards to culture and the world at large.
JC: Coming back to your own work, how do you deal with this? In Russia, how did you pick the sites that you wanted to take photos of? Russia is a huge country with a very complex -- and, in the West, poorly understood -- history. How did you decide what to include in your portrait of the country?
AM: One can't help but be a tourist the first time you visit a foreign place. My method has always been to take repeated trips back to a location I'm interested in, and so each time I return I get a bit deeper and slowly peel back the layers. One helpful tool in this process is a notebook I keep of the pictures I've shot up to that point, which helps me determine what holes to fill when I return, and lets me keep in mind the overall scheme and arc of the project.
In the case of Russia, I was quite familiar with both its history and culture before I arrived the first time, but I hadn't yet linked that knowledge to the more intimate understanding one gathers on the ground and in person. There is an amazing story of the poet Anna Akhmatova, standing in a line of women outside a prison during the Stalinist purges, all of them waiting in the remote hope of possibly seeing their jailed husbands. The women beside her knew she was a famous poet, and one whispered to her: "Remember this for us." Perhaps more than any other country, Russia is a place where history weighs mightily, and every individual's memory is laden, if not burdened, with the past. So I would say that despite what I knew of country's history before I went, the most crucial and enlightening ideas were gathered from the stories people told me.
In thinking about the Russia book, I had two guiding principles. One was to avoid as much as possible any well-worn stereotypes. There are very few pictures of big housing blocks in my book (and none of Red Square) because these seemed like the most ready-made and clichéd images of life in the former Soviet Union. Instead I tried to work more around the edges of things, and in fact many of the places I photographed were actually located along the periphery of the country. I ended up shooting points east, west, north, and south but not so much in the middle of the country. Although this was somewhat an arbitrary choice, it worked out rather well, as one of Russia's great historical problems has been a lack of clear boundaries with which to define itself.
The other idea was the use of contrasts, both within the subjects themselves and in the layout of the book. The type of subject I am most fond of shooting is that which presents a multilayered pattern of use and history. So, for example, I photographed a former synagogue that had been turned into a radio station, a monastery used as a gulag, a nobleman's mansion transformed into a children's theater, etc. For me these kinds of subjects present a cross section through time: they address Russia's complex past, as well as the larger compacting and collapsing processes of contemporary history. In laying out the book I was able to address the same issues across the page spread. One of my favorite examples of this type of contrast in the book is an image of a worker sleeping in his dark and crowded shop surrounded by banners and girlie photos, juxtaposed against a picture of two scheming executives in their well-lit but empty "constructivist" office.
JC: That image of the monastery turned Gulag turned monastery struck me, because I had just read Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A History." Despite the fact that the book contained a fair amount of details, some of which I had even known beforehand (like the infamous visit by Maxim Gorky, who refused to see the place for what it was), seeing your photo sent a chill down my spine. It seems like photography has to power to show things in a different way, and especially contemporary fine-art photography appears to be getting increasingly involved in this process (as, for example, the images from New Orleans show). It seems the boundaries between pure photojournalism and fine-art photography are not that clear any longer, or maybe it is just that one takes photos with people and the other one without. But seriously, what do you think about this development?
AM: I think this debate about pictures with or without people is inconsequential as a matter of overall artistic value. However, and again referring to Julius Shulman, if you look at his best pictures, the people are as carefully orchestrated as the construction of the architectural space. His "characters" locate the image in a particular point in time, and moreover, they enact a fantasy about American life, which is what I admire most about those images. Julius chose with care the models (or friends), clothes, props, etc. which most closely fit his vision of that space and accompanying lifestyle. Yet what he did best, and I have talked often with him about this, involved the "direction" of the people in his images, both their placement within the frame and their physical gestures. What makes his pictures extraordinary is the complex mixture of the real and the ideal, because in Shulman's photographs his characters are both imitating life as well as offering up an idealized version of it.
For example, there's a fantastic picture of a house shot from poolside in Palm Springs: a man in a bathing suit holds a towel wrapped around his neck with both hands while speaking to a woman who's reclined in a chaise longue and shading the sunlight off her face with her raised hand (on the other side of the frame is the architect himself, Richard Neutra, seated and reading some papers). The couple's relaxed pose balances out the aggressive industrial shapes of the house, and also embodies the idyll of postwar American life. Julius, even at 96 years of age today, is incredibly observant of the behavior of people, and he intuitively understood, much like a film director, how to get people into "character," as well as how their poses would play out within the context of the larger "scene." (Just by way of contrast, consider an artist like Saenredam, the 17th-century Dutch painter of church interiors and perhaps the first purely architectural artist. He created beautifully complex spaces out of Reformation interiors, but the little genre figures that provide a sense of scale and populate the lower parts of the panels were actually painted in by another artist.) As someone who loves and photographs architecture all the time, I truly admire Julius' ability to place figures in his spaces: it's extremely difficult to do well, perhaps more difficult than anything else, especially in large format, and Julius is absolutely a model to study for anyone interested in this problem.
As to your question about the blending of boundaries among the various modes of photography, I can only say this is a most welcome development. It reveals the continuing maturation of photography as a form of expression, and as a matter of practice, frees up the photographer from adhering to a set of fixed conventions. In fact, I think it is self-evident that the most interesting work of the moment is being done at the intersection of these formerly distinct styles, methods, schools, etc. (A rough analogy might be the phenomenon of "fake" news programs, such as The Daily Show, which is far more content rich than the standard fare on broadcast news.) We can disagree about the choice of subject or the meaning of the content, yet as a question of form, this process of shifting boundaries is not only inevitable, but also a very positive sign of photography's continuing ability to create compelling images.
|
